Aquinas Conference 2026: The Beauty of Truth On Saturday we had the Aquinas Conference in Auckland.  In the first talk “Portraits of a Saint,” Br Kolbe Garcia offered a deeply human portrait of St Thomas Aquinas, arguing that the essence of Thomas’s holiness lay in a life of contemplation expressed through preaching—the Dominican charism of contemplare et contemplata aliis tradere (“to contemplate and to hand on to others the fruits of contemplation”). Br Kolbe began with the famous moment near the end of Aquinas’s life when, after a mystical vision, Thomas declared that all he had written was “straw” compared to what he had seen. This remark, Br Kolbe suggested, revealed the heart of Thomas’s sanctity: he had spent his entire life seeking direct knowledge of God, and even his extraordinary theological output had been only a faint reflection of the divine reality he perceived in prayer. The talk traced Thomas’s life from his noble upbringing in the county of Aquino. His family, hoping for prestige, placed him as a child oblate at Monte Cassino, where he absorbed Scripture, the Divine Office, and the monastic rhythm of contemplation. Even as a boy, he reportedly asked profound questions—most famously, “What is God?”—foreshadowing his lifelong intellectual thirst. At Naples, Thomas encountered Aristotle and the newly founded Dominican Order. Drawn by their blend of study and preaching, he joined them despite fierce family opposition. His brothers kidnapped him and held him under house arrest for a year, during which, according to tradition, he memorised
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